We are showing the first joint exhibition of New York artists LEON GOLUB (born 1922) and NANCY SPERO (born 1926), who have been represented by the gallery with solo exhibitions since 1991. They were awarded the 3rd Hiroshima Art Prize in 1996. Leon Golub was participant of documenta 11 in 2002, Nancy Spero of documenta 10 in 1997. Since the very beginning of their creative activities in the early 50ies they have consistently taken up various issues related to war, violence and human rights, creating works with powerful messages from their respective viewpoints as a man and as a woman.

Nancy Spero is choosing images of women from various periods and cultures for her collages, always dealing with war and cult. For her, history is a history of wars and therefore a history of women, of victims as well as of surviving.

„Avoiding a feminist rant, Spero treads a fine line between polemic and humour. Humour is indeed a key weapon in her armoury, yet the dark side is never far from the surface.“

Elizabeth A.Macgregor

Nancy Spero's work „is a vital utopia in process, uncertain and unpredictable: a procession of maternal/feminine figures in a loose choreography (...), an homage to creation, and its continual potential for self-revision and the challenging of social and cultural order.“ (Catherine de Zegher)
She has completed a number of permanent installations and wall works at venues in the U.S. (Lincoln Centre subway station, New York) and Europe, three of them in Austria:
Ronacher Theatre Vienna, Jüdisches Museum Vienna and Heeresspital, Innsbruck.

"I have pictured some of the events and some of the kinds of experiences that undercut our current world pictures, that is to say the effects of power and domination, the uses of interrogation to control dissidence or opposition, how such behaviours effect the consciousness and psychic responses of victimizers and victims and also to indicate some of the public and private behavioral gestures of men acting out real time reactive scenarios.“

Leon Golub

In the last years Leon Golub has broken with structured, confrontational images, but his language still remained sardonic. Dogs, lions and cyborgs are now representing elements of change, aggression, and a whole range of irregular and irritable circumstances.